Overview:• Dr. Rolf Gomes,company, Heart of Australia,launched &quot;the heart bus&quot;, in October 2014, and in its first six months of operation, nine patients were referred for open heart surgery. Dr Gomes recently submitted a proposal to partner with the Queensland Government to expand to other regional towns and to include more specialty services such as respiratory physicians, gastroenterologists and urologists — but this has been rejected.

• Gold Coast exercise physiologist James Fletcher has pioneered a program to strengthen the breathing muscles of star athletes heading to Rio next month. The training involves software that makes it harder for an athlete to breathe, in turn strengthening their muscles.

• Associate Professor David Harrich, head of the HIV molecular virology laboratory at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, made the antiviral protein, known as the “Nullbasic”, by mutating an existing HIV protein. Once HIV-infected cells were treated with the protein, they stopped making virus particles.

News on Health Professional Radio. Today is the 19th of July 2016. Read by Rebecca Foster. Health News

“We’ve now seen in excess of 2,000 patients and these are people who might never have seen a cardiologist,” Dr Gomes said.

People living in the country are 44 per cent more likely to die of heart disease than people living in the city, and in some remote areas the figure can rise as high as 63 per cent.

There are a number of other medical outreach services for people living in the bush, including some specialty services such as cardiology, but Dr Gomes said this was not enough.

It was as a young trainee doctor on rural rotations that Dr Gomes was first struck by the lack of medical services available to people living in the bush.

He estimated it would cost $1 million to build the truck, then another $1 million to keep it on the road for a year, and he struggled to find funding.

Something finally clicked when coal seam gas mining company Arrow Energy came on board as principal sponsor — other companies followed suit, and St Andrew’s hospital helped with the fit-out.

With the truck near completion, Dr Gomes and his wife took out a second mortgage on their house for $800,000.

The Federal and Queensland governments each contributed $250,000, boosting the funding by half-a-million dollars, for the project to finally get off the ground.

Dr Gomes said the Heart of Australia mobile clinic was an ambitious pilot that proved specialist services city people often took for granted could be delivered to remote regions.

He recently submitted a proposal to partner with the Queensland Government to expand to other regional towns and to include more specialty services such as respiratory physicians, gastroenterologists and urologists — but this has been rejected.